il Boom

Is that Monica's Dad? — Yeah yeah, it was Tuesday, but Barbra Streisand turned 70 this week and today's best birthday is Jack Klugman. Who is super cool, but doesn't do good photos. So here's Babs, in a photo I simply couldn't not use.

Trailer-wise, well, there’s this, I guess. I don’t go for these pretentious arthouse flicks, but etc etc joke’s been done, man.

I’m not going to lie – that trailer could’ve made the concept of a bunch of superheroes kicking almighty amounts of ass more exciting. At times it’s a bit like ‘And then, oh, I dunno, Robert Downey Jnr turns up’, which is not really that amazing, unless you’re really into RDJ. I guess there is an emphasis on the Whedonian talky-talkiness, which is BALLS in a trailer. Start with a joke or a sententious bit of scene-setting, blow things up, have buh-boom, buh-boom fade ins and outs, end it on a line whispered over silence, url, done.

I’ve been doing a fair bit of arguing on the internet recently, and this is an invaluable guide to logical fallacies. Win every time! In your head.

OR! You could read a MostlyFilm post you may have missed this week:

La Grande Illusion – Renoir’s overlooked masterpiece, out on Blu Ray this week.

Making Music – a nostalgic ramble across the sacred turf of the romantic mixtape.

Mostly Records – a roundup of the best and not so best albums of the year so far.

Il Boom – Vittorio De Sica’s film about debt in times of economic prosperity.

Join us next week for: an actual opinion on Avengers! Pop pop pop musik! More Monoglot Movie Madness! THE STATHE!

By Blake Backlash

There is a scene in Vittorio De Sica’s Il Boom where a number of well-to-do Italians dance to a band who are performing the tackier sort of early 60s pop song. The lyrics are sung in English. That same quality of a cheap import is imbued in the title of the film. Whereas most European countries created a label in their own language to denote their rapid, post-war economic growth (it is hard to think of a word less German than Wirtschaftswunder), the Italian media co-opted their term from English. ‘Il Boom’ has connotations of something messy and uncontrollable, while at the same time seeming voguish and silly, perhaps even meaningless. Such associations suit De Sica’s satire – which is interested in showing us the empty spaces that might be concealed by the ostentatious sixties prosperity.

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